Earlier work [Faber et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1865 (1994)] reported
differences among American-English-speaking listeners from Utah and
Connecticut/NY in perception of the HEEL--HILL and POOL--PULL contrasts (pairs
that are nearly merged in Utah but distinct in the northeast US), measured by
three tasks, labeling, AXB discrimination, and keyword identification. On these
tasks, a few CT/NY listeners (those with parents from the southern US)
performed differently from the other subjects. Their vowel spaces also were
qualitatively different from those of the other listeners, based on acoustic
analysis of three readings of the keywords. The CT/southern listeners had more
high back crowding and did better on Utah POOL/PULL than the other listeners,
while the Utah listeners had more high front crowding and did better on Utah
HEEL/HILL. These results accord with the literature reviewed by Bradlow
[Cross-Linguistic Study of Vowel Inventories, Cornell (1993)] relating
listeners' ability to discern small vowel differences to the number of vowels
in their language, but were tentative because of the small number of
CT/southern subjects. The current study presents perception and production data
from additional Connecticut/NY subjects confirming the original finding. [Work
supported by NIH.]